You would think the banks would have an obligation to protect investors' money.

Banks were securitizing the bad loans and selling them off immediately.They protected their investors money, it's the poor assholes who bought those fraudulently rated AAA bundled loans that weren't protected.

The people who want to blame this on government housing policy or sub-prime borrowers are the financial equivalent of climate change deniers (yes, I'm talking about the GP).All of the official reports blame widespread fraud on the part of lenders.Anyone who disagrees with this is in an alternate universe.

This is the Congressional Report from 2011:The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United Stateshttp://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-FCIC/pdf/GPO-FCIC.pdf [gpo.gov] (663 pages PDF)

They lay out in extensively footnoted detail who was responsible and who wasn't, but I'll save you the trouble of reading them:The collapse was caused by weak regulatory controls, conflicts of interest in the banking sector, lending fraud, credit ratings agencies' fraud, massive failures in risk management by the financial sector, and insufficient capital reserves.

These financial deniers need to cite legitimate research that supports their position.At the bare minimum, supporting documents would need to lay out (with numbers) what deserves the blame.Because the official reports say things like

Research indicates only 6% of high-cost loansâ"a proxy for subprime loansâ"had any connection to the [1977 CRA] law. Loans made by CRA-regulated lenders in the neighborhoods in which they were required to lend were half as likely to default as similar loans made in the same neighborhoods by independent mortgage originators not subject to the law.

The facts are out there, if only you'd look past the media noise machines.

So a bank that hands somebody a few hundred thousand dollars without due diligence is not at fault?

While we're at it, what changed? I got my mortgage in 1999, and it came with all sorts of things beyond (a largely meaningless) credit check, like past tax returns showing level and continuity of income, disclosure of other debt, and all sorts of sniffing up my butt even though I have an honest face. What suddenly made banks so trusting? (hint: look up CDO's, CDS's, and all sorts of other three letter scams that were popular around 2000-2008).

i agree that its not the banks fault. Its the people who bought the homes, but its also the governments fault for mandating banks make the loans

Ah, the CRA red herring. Passed in 1977, but magically took 30 years before it had any ill effect.

And that wasn't even the real problem. the collapse happened becasue there where taking c/d/f loan and bundling them up with A loans and calling the whole package an 'A'And we are talking abut millions of loans being resold.

The collapse would never have happened if banks where forced to sit on a loan the made for 5 years.

So a bank that hands somebody a few hundred thousand dollars without due diligence is not at fault?

At fault for what? They wasted their own money and the money of their investors, nothing more. Their kind of greed and stupidity punishes itself in a free market.

The injury from the mortgage "crisis" arises from the fact that the government forced people who spent their money prudently to bail out the banks and borrowers who had made stupid and greedy decisions.

The majority of American simply do not understand the term "free market" they believe that the "free" means free from regulation, yet nothing could be further from the truth. An economic market is not a "thing" it's a set of rules governing trade (eg:property law), a "set of rules" that's "free from regulation" is an oxymoron. "Free" actually refers to membership, in that everyone is free to participate in the market, provided they play by the rules. Some example of non-free markets - the international arms trade, nuclear fuel and waste industries, OPEC, etc.

Point 2 does not follow since point 1 uses the Fox News definition of "free market".

Sigh, someone says to you stop paying off someone else's mortgage, I will lend you 500K but don't worry about the payments because the housing market is booming and the capital gains you make will pay off the loan for you. People with little financial knowledge who had never made such a large and complicated purchase were scammed by lenders who knew exactly what they were doing - increasing their commision revenue by not giving a flying fuck about the mess they left behind. This is why the banks stopped tru

well, you are demonstrably wrong. This is thoroughly investigated, but hey, you don't let facts change your narrative. The next thing you know you'll have to start applying thought to your biases, and you can't have that, can you?

Not caused by banks? So all those bank executives who were bundling up bad mortgages together and selling them as premium mortgages so that they could make made money off of bad investments had absolutely nothing to with it.

I'm going to just make a wild guess and say that you know nothing about what actually happened.

Then you haven't put much thought into it. People with bad credit history (or good) are utterly incapable of forcing a bank to lend them money. The decision to lend money for a mortgage is at the sole discretion of the lender. They alone decide if the credit-worthiness of the borrower justifies the loan. They created the sub-prime packages for investors in hedge funds, and they alone then bet against those packages...YES, the very packages they created! The government didn't force them to make those loans. That whole thing was built as an investment vehicle by the banks, allowing wealthy Americans to purchase the debt owed on sub-primes with higher interest rates, thus higher ROI. And everyone ate it up: the investors, the lenders, and the least qualified to know what the hell was going on...the borrowers.

I witnessed this shady practice first-hand as a first-time home buyer (my credit was fine though). I went to a broker and told him what I could comfortably afford for a mortgage payment (including taxes, insurance, etc.). I asked, based on that figure how much can I offer on a house. He gave me an amount, and I went house shopping. I found a home, made an offer, and he came back with a mortgage payment that was 25% more than what I said I could afford. Needless to say, I was pissed and told him off. 25% isn't a lot when you are talking about dinner, but it's hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars when talking about a mortgage. When I stopped the deal, the real estate agent called the broker to find out what was going on. He told her that he didn't know what the problem was...I was approved, I just didn't like the price. That in itself is telling. They approved me for a loan that was well in excess of what I already told them I could comfortably afford. Then the real estate agent, a licensed realtor mind you, told me that since I made the offer I was legally bound to honor it (total bullshit).

It may be more cleaned up now, but back in 2007, I think everyone involved in real estate became a con artist drunk on the promise of easy riches. I of course cannot speak to the motives of every person who got a sub-prime mortgage loan, but blaming people with bad credit for that crisis feels a lot like blaming the victims. It's possible these people, knowing their financial straights, would have never even considered buying a home. But here comes a letter from First National Never Trust telling them, "Hey, it's not as bad as you think!. You can OWN your house for just a bit more than you're paying in rent." And they trot out spreadsheets and graphs to back up that claim. So the financially challenged are thinking, "Wow, I had no idea! Sure!". You can buy that mail list you know. Give me every person in the United States who pays rent and has a sub-650 credit rating (or whatever the number). They're ambulance chasers.

And you want to blame the borrower for that? Wow. That's just willful ignorance; a total lack of understanding that companies, like people, need to take responsibility for their actions; and a complete lack of empathy for people being emotionally prayed upon by those companies.

who can we blame for that? Id say its the governments fault for mandating the banks give out the loans to people the banks knew couldnt pay for them. I believe this happened under clinton? im not 100% however

> You do, because you live in a country where sub-prime rated folk think they can afford a $500000 mansion. And thus need the Government to prevent stupid.

That's entirely the result of corrupt bankers lying to those sub-prime rated folks. You are trying to fault the least qualified and experienced member of that exchange and going out of your way to ignore the people that are supposed to be "the adults it the room".

Bankers should act like they have something to lose but don't because an entire framework

There are primaries going on in the coming weeks in many states. If you are not voting in them, you shouldnt be complaining. If you ARE, you pretty much dont have a reason to complain about the voting in this country.

Protip, we have cycled leaders a number of times while Putin has remained in charge in Russia.

If you ARE, you pretty much dont have a reason to complain about the voting in this country.

Except with the current 2 party system, primaries are useless to the minority party in many districts. Not to mention national-level elections are more determined by the amount of money spent than actual positions, which was his point. If the Koch brothers want to spend millions on a candidate, they usually win. There's plenty of reason to complain...

No, in fact the Constitution is a regulative document not a normative document.Regulative means that the Federal Government is only granted those powers explicitly stated in the Constitution, Normative means it would have those powers plus any others it might need. So my proof that the Constitution is normative comes from the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

It's so very sad that most Americans have never READ the Constitution. They're all so very certain the things they WANT are "constitutional" and the things they don't want others doing are "unconstitutional" but most are clueless because they've never even bothered to READ it. This nation would not be in so many of the messes it's in right now if we had simply folowed the document. It's not like reading it would take any real effort; it's written in English, and unlike "War and Peace" or "Atlas Shrugged" the founders wrote it on FOUR (big) pages.

For those too lazy to look it up... the ninth ought to make LIMITED federal government very clear even before you get to the 10th:

"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."

The entire POINT of the Constitution was to create a small VERY LIMITED federal government with specific limited powers and responsibilities and leave the rest to the states and the people. It says this over and over again and re-states it in the 9th and 10th Amendments within the Bill of Rights. This is contrary to the desires of most politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, investment bankers etc so they've packed the government, including the courts, with people who don't give a damn about their oaths or the Constitution and who will legislate and rule in whatever way benefits them.

It was about slavery because the Southern states have admitted as much. They authored and published those documents, "declarations of secession", which outlined the reasons why they wanted to secede. Every single one of them features slavery prominently; in most, it is the main point.

Besides which, the smoking gun is in the constitution of the CSA. The changes that it has relative to the original USA constitution, again, feature slavery prominently - requiring federal recognition and enforcement of it , and

Gotta love the liberal revisionist history. If the civil war was only about slavery:

1) Why were there Union states that still allowed slavery?2) Why did it take Lincoln two years AFTER the war started to deliver the emancipation proclamation?3) Why were there Union states that still did not abolish slavery AFTER the emancipation proclamation and even AFTER the Civil War?

The answer is simple. Lincoln was willing to tolerate the status quo of slavery to preserve the Union. However, he was determined to prevent slavery from being established in the new territories. The South decided that wasn't good enough and decided to secede. The emancipation proclamation was meant to punish and undermine the states in rebellion.

You can argue that the war was also about the right of secession, but the issue of slavery was the cause for the split, and of that there is no doubt.

It is one more piece on the 1984 puzzle. It actually made me remember the movie What About Bob? [imdb.com]: baby steps to total information awareness / citizen extortion state, baby steps to police state, baby steps to fucking irrecoverable totalitarian oligarchy... hey, is that Winston Smith?

It's a federal financial database, not state-run news agencies. Oh no! The government knows information that I already give other government agencies!

No, it's about the government snooping into a lot of information that it DOESN'T already have (on most people, anyway) and doesn't have any legitimate reason to have.

Since its inception, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been far more about snooping than protecting anybody. And now they're saying they're going to do something they were never supposed to do in the first place, and promised not to do.

Exactly, this is idiotic. You submit MUCH more financial information than this to the government every year.

Honestly credit ratings are one area that the government may be the *right* organization to control. The current credit agencies are for-profit businesses that have very little interest in keeping your information accurate (or investigating shady companies who try to use your credit rating as extortion) and you have very little recourse to fix their mistakes.

In the 1850s, Austria-Hungary was in theory censoring all the printed media in the empire. But the technical reality was that there were fifty guys scribbling with quills who had virtually no ability to control what gets disseminated anywhere beyond the major newspapers and such. In the 2010s, USA and Europe in theory respects the laws protecting the privacy of individual citizen. But the technical reality is that the society is computerized to such a degree that stuff about people jumps at you even without

The government gives you the opportunity to find out what they are doing.

i wish this were true but if it were wouldnt have the need for wikileaks and edward snowden. As I said to the other poster though, I can chose to do business with private company ABC, i dont get to choose if i do business with the federal government. Ill take the option of choice over force anytime

hate to burst your utopian-bubble, but the last time i checked, in world history Government has caused, roughly, about a bazillion times more pain and sufferings than any corporation could ever even begin to conceive of.

i can't get my head around this "trust the government" meme..."government" is nothing but a group of busybody people (yes the same type of people who work in corporations, and at taco bells, and everywhere else btw) who crave power and use personality and politics, NOT merit or compassion, to secure their base and influence and really care much less about your personal miseries and stresses then the typical corporate executive does.

its bad business to anger and kill your customers, governments rarely care about that sort of stuff, esp. they get in the way of maintaining their power over you and your life.

at least corporations have to compete for your blessings, and can pretty easily be displaced.

hate to burst your utopian-bubble, but the last time i checked, in world history Government has caused, roughly, about a bazillion times more pain and sufferings than any corporation could ever even begin to conceive of

So now you think you live in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia? Now who has delusions.

i can't get my head around this "trust the government" meme

Neither could the people who wrote the Constitution, which is why we're supposed to have freedom of the press and elections. It's far from perfect, and thanks to corporate influence it's getting worse, but I'm still not learning the Horst Wessel Song or the Internationale.

BTW, you do know that one of the main complaints of the people who wrote that Constitution was the way the British government was influenced by the East I

You sound just like the Jews who chose not to flee Germany prior to 1938. It's all just a bunch of rhetoric, they said. No reason to be afraid, they said. Yeah. Nazi Germany really didn't exist as a cohesive unit, up until a point--and then unholy hell broke out. Ol' Adolf was legitimately elected, and used the liberalized rights guaranteed by the Weimar constitution to get himself there. Likewise, prior to 1922, nobody lived in in a Soviet transitional state. That's the point about keeping an eye on the pa

The best thing about private organizations is they can be regulated by the government. You need to have the regulating body be a separate body from the group being regulated. This is why our national budget follows broken accounting rules that would get a CEO thrown into prison. CEOs are regulated by an external body, but government isn't (unless you count citizens, who should but don't pay attention).

It is true regulating bodies can be taken over by industry, but that's still an extra barrier compared to

As opposed to the private credit rating agencies that have all your personal credit information with zero transparency and accountability?

I'd rather this be in the public sphere where hopefully the agency has my interests at heart, rather than some private, for profit corporation.

From the article:

As many as 227 million Americans may be compelled to disclose intimate details of their families and financial lives

The key difference is that private credit rating agencies don't have the legal authority to compel you to provide them with any information. They might use some underhanded means to obtain some of that information, but they can't send you to prison for not telling them what they want to know. The government, however, does have that power. It is the powers of compulsion, not the database itself, which has me worried.

She was told 'no' because she went through a carefully thought out and vetted process designed to deal with a very limited supply of a very important item (an organ). The parents decided to escalate the issue and brought the courts in - which was completely inappropriate (if understandable). This was a 'think of the cute little child' moment and had nothing to do with 'death panels' or rationing.

So, unwrap your panties. Life is more complex than cleaning out the bong.

The courts didn't save any life, and in fact, they didn't even get involved. Cigna eventually reversed their decision, but the girl died before the transplant could be performed, anyway. Amazing how an entire debate can go on here without anyone knowing the actual facts of the example.

I never said they didnt. but my argument was never that private insurance did not do that. the government said they would not do that, and laughed as us for believing they would... yet here they are proving us right. Learn to focus on the topic at hand. Next your gonna tell me its bushes fault as well right?

im not lying at all. as you pointed out I guess we could use different definitions of death panels, but the facts are simple. Burocrats deciding who lives or die rather than doctors. it is a fact, it did happen and they admitted it happened.

we can argue all day about whos definition is correct or not, or we can work towards making sure it doesnt happen again

Mortgages are public records. State and local governments already have all that data. Anyone can look it up. Data companies have already collected it for most parts of the US and use it for marketing.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is only going to have a 1 in 20 sample of the data. That's enough to look for improper activity by lenders. There's a lot of funny stuff going on in the foreclosure area, but nobody has been analysing that as a "big data" problem.

Mortgages are public records. State and local governments already have all that data. Anyone can look it up.

I don't think mortgages are public record. Sales of houses and their prices are public record, but that is a far cry from knowing your actual mortgage (maybe you paid cash?)

There's a lot of funny stuff going on in the foreclosure area, but nobody has been analysing that as a "big data" problem.

Yes, "big data in a cloud with web 2.0" is the solution. It is reasonably known what "funny stuff" goes on, but instead of cracking down on these practices, we are going to do reports. Reports are needed to identify the problem when it is a mystery.

Any real estate that has a mortgage will have a lien on the title. That lien will be recorded along with the title at a public records office so the owner cannot sell the property without clearing the lien.

The details of what gets recorded in the lien are a matter of state law, but certainly there will be some description that the lien is in fact a mortgage.

Some (wealthy) people conduct property transactions partially or entirely as private contracts. Back when I was in a business involving engineering in public right-of-ways, many county property records just described transactions as "for the price of $20 and other valuable considerations". Often for multi-million dollar waterfront lots. And then there's property which is held by a corporation, where the records of transfer (unregistered securities not available to the general public) will never be a matter of public record.

But these sorts of transactions are beyond the authority of the FHFA and CFPB. And that is by the design of the parties involved. So, in one sense, who cares? The common folk (who need consumer protection) are already a matter of record and the rich don't want/don't need the government meddling in their affairs.

Problems arise when parties at the margins of the public/private transaction decision look at this new body of law and push their decision over to the private side. I don't care about the mortgage fraud issue so much. But there is already a massive amount of property value that is 'off the books' and not contributing to local tax bases. And this sort of nonsense will just make it worse.

Lots of land doesn't have a mortgage on it. In fact my home doesn't have a mortgage. I think I saw a statistic that some 30% of US homes are free of mortgages.

However that has nothing to do with a title history for a piece of land. That title is on file at a government office somewhere, assuring that the history of ownership is recorded, and there is a record of the taxes on the land. If the taxes don't get paid the government will take title and generally sell it to recover taxes owed.

", are NOT public record"Yes they are.If you want to buy something from me using credit, I can get ALL that information. It's not even expensive.

You are saying if I authorize you to obtain a copy of my credit report, and give you my SSN, data of birth, name and address, you can obtain a copy, and this means it is public record. You and I have very different definition of public record.

Late creditcard payment? Skipped a child support payment? Forgot to pay the water bill? It'll be recorded. Or so TFA says.

The database will also encompass a mortgage holderâ(TM)s entire credit history, including delinquent payments, late payments, minimum payments, high account balances and credit scores, according to the notice.

Really?! "high account balances?!"

The composition of your family? Feast your eyes on this little nugget FTFA:

The two agencies will also assemble âoehousehold demographic data,â including racial and ethnic data, gender, marital status, religion, education, employment history, military status, household composition, the number of wage earners and a familyâ(TM)s total wealth and assets.

Folks.. it *is* big brother. People are focusing on only the mortgage aspect, but if TFA is to be believed, it's a financial dragnet.

What the fuck are they looking for? People spending large sums on strange things?

It won't be for bureaucratic purposes. This will get tied in with law enforcement somehow. That's just my gut feeling, folks... but I do really think LEOs will want in on this.

"Mr Smith, we'd like to have a word with you.. every two weeks you withdraw $100 cash, then as you can see in these pictures, the city's automated license plate readers catch you visiting the address of a known marijuana dealer every time you make that withdrawal. Please step into the van, sir."

It's coming. Maybe not for a bag of sweet leaf, but surely for other things.

2001 was the year the US ended. We sold out to the Gov't and did so willingly; because Terrorism!, because Think of the Children, because War on Drugs! But mainly because Terrorism.

To hell with the federal government, might as well call it the Reich now.

One thing is to have financial information about individuals and their families scattered across multiple entities with defined boundaries and different search mechanisms -- it's another thing entirely to have the same financial info in one nice, convenient, easy-to-search, easy-to-abuse place.

Now that I've had some time to chew on the news and my post, it occurs to me that this is also a profiling tool. Perhaps predictive uses could also be found for it?

The ranting will continue, by the way, by myself and others, until either we're dead, or a dramatic change of course happens to this country. And yes, I remember the ranting 30 years ago. Vividly. Along with images of Carter and Shah, Reagan and Ayatollah, Bush and Noriega, Bush II and Saddam, Obama and bin-Laden, brought to us by talking heads and punctuated by the nodding of a million muggles' heads.

No one. Fucking. Listened. Now we're playing the same songbook again, only the music is much more sinister, faster and more intense.

One thing is to have financial information about individuals and their families scattered across multiple entities with defined boundaries and different search mechanisms -- it's another thing entirely to have the same financial info in one nice, convenient, easy-to-search, easy-to-abuse place.

How many private - corporate - entities have the resources needed to cross those boundaries and build a comprehensive, centralized, financial database of their own? How many of these databases already exist? How difficult are they to access?

You mean some federal SWAT-types are gonna bust down my door and force me at gunpoint to fill out a form? Answer intimate questions like "boxers or briefs?", "pink or stink?", or perhaps even (gasp) "paper ot plastic?" OH NOES!!!

Oh wait..."compelled" means that CoreLogic (the corporation that already has all my mortgage data) wants to sell the data to the CFPB. Mmmm...doesn't look like much in the way of compellin goin on. No SWAT Team for me, then.

Serious economic scrutiny would stop a lot of crime. Does anyone not know someone or some business that gets by while perpetually breaking the law? How many people could not hope to explain how they can pay and expensive mortgage, a car lease or other symptoms of a rich life all the while declaring the income of a pauper?

CoreLogic, Inc. is a North American corporation providing financial, property and consumer information, analytics and business intelligence. Headquartered in Irvine, CA, the company analyzes information assets and data to provide clients with analytics and customized data services. Data sources include property and mortgage information, motor vehicle records, criminal background records and tax records.

Full Disclosure: Worked at one of the money center banks in both Small Business and Credit Cards for six years and a foreign bank with a US presence for 4.

What is this thing and do I need to get my foil hat?

The database they are constructing is being used to conduct performance reviews on originated mortgages. The database won't pick you up unless you start a mortgage. Once you originate the mortgage this database is being put into place in order to monitor your performance on that mortgage and your corresponding financial condition.

Why are they doing this?To stop the next credit crisis as the system would allow surveillance over mortgages originated by banking institutions. Today, banking regulators have broad powers to request information out of banks including everything that's going to be held in this database (personal information about you, you bet - your bank is pulling regular credit reports on you and the regulator can check your progress when they come in for an exam. Building the database would shortcut that request and help get a better view as to how institutions are originating. No longer would regulators have to show up and start poking around at a bank, but they could monitor the health of the banks portfolio.

Who would be against this? This sounds like a way to crack down on banks.It is a way to crack down on banks and ensure that what's being originated isn't crap. Think about it. We could have better monitored the health of the entire mortgage system by have having this database in place. Those who are against this are most likely those who have a vested interest in ensuring that the mortgage industry opaque to regulators. Those concerned about privacy should realize all of this data is being collected today, I can pull your credit report and cross it with data from CoreLogic and do roughly the same thing. Yes it is all in one place and with a government entity, but so long as its being used responsibility I don't have a problem with it as it would create an excellent tool for finding bad actors within the mortgage industry.

The credit crisis didn't happen because people took out loans they couldn't afford. People will do that every chance they get. The bankers wanted the rules loosened up. The government did that and before long whole new financial commodity products were created using all these new "sub-primes" everywhere.

It's like knocking down part of a dam and then blaming the water for flooding the place.

Yeah, but doesn't *everything* fall apart with "so long as its being used responsibly". It's great that the military has the weapons it needs to do its job, "as long as they're being used responsibly."

That's not the way to think about this. The way to think about is to ask what can the government do do you that the couldn't do before?

Just like any private enterprise, the government can pull your credit report if it wants to. Now. And you'd better believe they do when they're investigating someone, or ev

As part of the conditions of setting up the serial number of every person in the US, it was written into law that the government shall not use the magic number for anything other than social security accounting. Yes, I know they broke that law long, log ago and continue doing so. But it's still the law. (Did you know you can get a TAX ID number if you wish not to use your SSN when filing 'voluntary' taxes?)

Though it's far more poignant today than ever before, the government doesn't follow its own laws.